What's gone wrong at Google? Why does Android L suck so badly? Why is it a technical mess
and why are we being expected to wait until February for Google to sort its house out?
As I've mentioned in a number of hardware reviews over the last month, Android Lollipop
is an absolute disaster for Google. It provides an operating system update that unfortunately
hamstrings every device we've put it onto, causing forced closes. memory leaks, problems
with the wifi, battery drain, it goes on and on. And it does seem to me that these problems
existed from the earliest betas we were trying of Android L. Yet they released it anyway.
What on earth was Google thinking? Well the only thing that I can come to is Google had
an arbitrary date they had to hit for their OEMs before Christmas because they want those
updates out quickly, you know, we''ll deliver in 30 days, we'll deliver in 90 days the updates
for your new piece of hardware. Great. But only if that update isn't a bug-ridden mess.
Whatever Google was playing at, all they've managed to do is create a wide range of their
own devices and partners' devices which are not working properly. We've got an HTC One
M8, a Nexus 5, an Nvidia Shield tablet and a Nexus 10, none of which are working properly
with Android L. All are exhibiting forced close issues. All are exhibiting memory leaks.
All are exhibiting problems with wifi that won't work properly in Europe because the
channels are not all complete there. Unfortunately whatever Google was doing here it just seems
to have been a shove it out of the door, not even Apple makes these kind of mistakes. Certainly
if it does make these kind of mistakes it at least issues patches really quickly to
get devices up to date, to resolve those problems. Three weeks, that's not quite so long to wait
when you're thinking about nearly three months between an initial code drop and Google getting
around to issuing a 5.0.1 update fix. That's ridiculous Google. Absolutely bonkers. And
if you're talking about having an eco system which can be kept up to date easily, this isn't the
way to go about it. Because what we now have is a situation where you still can't update devices
quickly enough, even your own Nexus devices apparently. And we're all going to have to
wait three months for fixes. It's totally unacceptable and I really hope other people
will agree with me on this one. What we need to see is these bug fixes pushed out really
promptly, even if that means releasing smaller fixes rather than larger combined fix lists. In
other words, the wifi bug, that should be fixed as a priority because at the moment
there is not enough support within Europe for the wifi options you've provided here.
Essentially, in the US you've got a limited number of channels, 1-11. In Europe we have
up to 13. Those extra channels are missing and we're not getting as good support within
the European wireless spectrum as we should have. This is also extended out to the dual
band option as well, which again is only operating on auto, you can't actually put your router
on to any channel you choose in the 5G spectrum there, you have to use just the auto and let
the device work it out itself. That's fine in some cases but in the majority of cases
if there's lots of other 5G access points around you, it's not going to work very well.
It just strikes me that Google needs a swift kick up the backside to realise it has a billion
customers out there and potentially hundreds of millions of those are already starting
to get their Android updates. That's made even worse when we consider that Samsung and
others are getting those updates ready for around January. Now it may very well be those
updates will have to be delayed. I cannot see Samsung, HTC and others pushing out their
first party software update and finding that actually half of the Android operating system
doesn't work properly. So it could be that whilst they're talking January we're actually
going to be talking February because they're going to have to wait really for Google to push
this update out, as we all are right now. We basically have a situation where Google
is breaking devices. Certainly this update is not making devices run any better. It's
just making them run worse. So, let me know in the comments what you think. What are your
experiences running Android L on your devices? We can't get a single device to work successfully
here in a way that we would consider to be a daily driver. It really is unacceptable
and hey, really all we can do now is see if we can put a bit of pressure on Google to
change things, get this update out quicker and restore some faith in Google and their updates.
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